Dear {{first_name | supporter }},
Isabel Rose is 25 years old. She is from Hackney, a few miles from our door. On Wednesday, a court in Hong Kong will decide how many years of her life she spends in prison.
In January 2024, Isabel flew to Hong Kong at the invitation of a British man she had met while travelling in Thailand. She says that within hours of arriving, he raped her in his apartment. She reported it to Hong Kong police three days later.
Police arrested the man. They released him without charge. Days after that, they arrested Isabel.
She was charged with blackmail, and later with perverting the course of public justice. For two years she was on bail in Hong Kong, unable to work, unable to come home. In March she was convicted. She is now held in Tai Lam Correctional Institution, Hong Kong's oldest maximum security women's prison, waiting to learn her sentence. She faces up to seven years.
Isabel told the BBC:
"I'd just gone to the police to report rape and within about 30 hours there were six or seven police officers at my door. It takes a lot to report something like that, to then be treated as a criminal. I felt like my dignity was stripped away."
Why we are speaking
We are not in a position to reopen a foreign court's findings, and we will not pretend otherwise.
But we can say this. In every jurisdiction, including our own, rape complainants are still measured against assumptions about how a "real" victim behaves. She should have resisted. She should remember it cleanly. She should have cut contact. She should fall apart on cue.
Trauma does not work that way.
After sexual violence, people send messages that read as ordinary. They stay in touch. They minimise. They give accounts that shift as memory settles. None of that is proof that nothing happened. It is how the mind survives something it cannot process.
Cheryl Yip, Advocacy Officer at Hong Kong's Association Concerning Sexual Violence Against Women, has described how dated laws remain a challenge for victim-survivors there, with questioning that still turns on what a woman was wearing, whether she had been drinking, and whether she resisted hard enough.
Those assumptions are not confined to Hong Kong. We see them here, every day, in the women who walk through our doors.
What we are asking for
Isabel is a British citizen. She reported an allegation against another British citizen. She is now facing sentencing in a foreign court, thousands of miles from her family.
The British government has consular obligations to her. We are calling on it to fulfil them actively: to monitor her welfare in custody, to press for her wellbeing, and to stand with her family through Wednesday and whatever follows.
Dame Meg Hillier MP, who represents Hackney South and Shoreditch, has already raised this case with the Foreign Office. If you live in her constituency, your voice carries particular weight. If you live elsewhere, write to your own MP and ask what the Foreign Office is doing for a British woman in a Hong Kong prison.
If you have experienced sexual violence, or you are not safe right now, we are here. You will be believed. Find our services at sistahspace.org.
In solidarity,
Megan Clementson Cox,
Sistah Space
P.S. Isabel's family are raising awareness and looking for support online. You can follow her story and support them at @iamisabelrosee on Instagram.